WTF?! In the age of smart homes, it seems every appliance needs a Wi-Fi connection and a smartphone app: lights, doorbells, door locks, garage door openers, TVs, lawn mowers, vacuum cleaners, and even coffee makers. A recent incident shows how filling a home with IoT devices raises the odds that a glitch will clog the network.
An IT worker was recently shocked to discover that his parents' Keurig coffee maker had uploaded more than a terabyte of data in just 10 days. While a bug is the likely cause, the episode highlights the growing risks of connecting more and more mundane devices to the internet.
Twitter user @NomadsGalaxy noticed the Keurig's extreme data usage in UniFi while looking over his parents' network, where it had saturated an access point. After seeing it had uploaded approximately 1TB and downloaded nearly 10GB in 10 days, he said he was unplugging it immediately and buying his parents a replacement.
– Nomad (@NomadsGalaxy) October 6, 2026
Fortunately, most of the traffic never left the local network, and a reboot would likely have fixed the issue. Even so, Nomad decided that investigating further, and letting his parents keep using an internet-connected Keurig, wasn't worth the effort.
For those wondering why a coffee maker needs an internet connection, Keurig's smart coffee makers use the company's mobile app to brew coffee remotely, let users buy coffee online, and set up recurring deliveries. Nomad half-jokingly theorized that Keurig could eventually deploy DRM to restrict its coffee makers to the company's pods, mirroring HP's inkjet printer cartridge business model.
As smart homes and IoT devices have grown in popularity, so have the risks. Besides network congestion, IoT devices can become a vector for cyberattacks, especially since many manufacturers don't prioritize security. Smart appliances can also become unusable if their manufacturers go out of business, stop providing software updates, or lay off the engineers who maintained the firmware.
Robot lawn mowers can be particularly risky since they record footage, property layouts, and Wi-Fi network information. This year alone, security gaps exposed lawn mowers from two companies to spying and unauthorized remote control, potentially revealing the personal data of thousands of owners worldwide.
Tech giants keep expanding their smart home ambitions despite the risk. Apple is set to hold a product launch event on October 13, where it is expected to unveil its first smart home hub with a display to rival similar devices from Google and Amazon.